News: Tagged as FF Newberlin

In July, we launched our Collection Tier FontFont Blog series. Each month, we will be sharing our top picks from our Collection Tier suitable for particular intended use with a few handy hints to boot! Inspired by London 2012, next up in our series are our ‘Olym-picks’ – a round-up of our favorite Collection Tier FontFonts suitable for Sports.

Rememberability: Quite a few kids in school would rather doodle the logos of their favorite bands and sports teams than pay attention to their teachers. As a designer, you need to give these kids a hand! Design team identities that are unique enough to stand out from the competition, but easy enough for 11-year-olds to draw.

Sports logos are something that fans of all ages identity with. Here is an opportunity to design a feeling – go ahead and try letterforms that are ornate or complicated. When it comes to sports, relying on tradition can be helpful, too. Fans will remember the style of lettering on their team’s championship-winning uniforms decades later. Script typefaces are a natural choice for team logos – especially in baseball – but can appear too nostalgic for some other sports. Big, chunky angular type is a perennial favorite. Whatever you select, make sure that it has individual and memorable shapes.

Clarity: When it comes to player identification, clarity is important; referees, announcers and fans all need to be able to see the names and numbers on player uniforms clearly. These can take a different style from a team’s logo. Since the playing field isn’t an immersive reading environment, using all-caps text is OK. Remember, though, that uppercase letters are less differentiable than lowercase – no one wants to mix up names like KAHN and HAHN. Selecting type families that include multiple widths may be helpful, too, as the same team might have players with both long and short last names: BECKENBAUER and PELÉ, for instance.

A low-contrast sans serif, slab serif or semi-serif family is almost always going to be the right way to go. Multiple width-options are more important than having multiple weights, but two or three levels of stroke thickness to choose from is never going to be a bad thing.

Dynamism: The right typefaces for sports usages should look ‘fast’. Even though it is a bit cliché, picking styles that are slanted or italicized is a still good shorthand for speed. Some sporting events have other iconic elements that typefaces can play off of: simple, light geometric forms combine well with the Olympic rings, and typefaces with round letters allow for gimmicks, like substituting various balls for letters like the O.

As is mentioned above, typefaces with clear, hard-working forms lend themselves well to many different kinds of sports. Picking fonts that are part of larger families gives you access not just to multiple widths or weight, but may offer you dynamic italic or oblique styles, too. Make sure to look at all of the fonts in a family when comparing different typefaces.

About our Collection Tier

Our Collection Tier FontFonts are a selection of cost effective typographical treasures offered as full-families. All packages are available in OpenType with Standard language support (with a few key exceptions) and are all affordably priced under €/$ 100 each.